NVIDIA Fermi to be launched as GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470

Contrary to what everyone expected, the next-gen GPUs from NVIDIA will not be launched as the GeForce GTX 300 series. A message on NVIDIA's official Facebook fan page reveals the first two Fermi GPUs will be released as the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470.

I'm not really sure why NVIDIA changed its naming scheme again, but perhaps it's to point out that these chips have DirectX 11 support, while the currently available GeForce 300 series chips are limited to DirectX 10.1.

Fun Fact of the Week: GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 will be the names of the first two GPUs shipped based on our new GF100 chip!